The present invention relates generally to the field of image processing.
Fine art reproduction has been an area of commercial interest. Two-dimensional (2-D) original artworks, such as paintings, drawings and posters, can be reproduced as printed reproduction by photographing the artworks under a lighting set-up, and printing the captured images on poster-size media. The faithfulness of the reproduction is affected by several factors, one of which is the illumination on the objects being photographed. When a 2-D object is photographed by a camera under non-uniform illumination, the captured image of the object contains regions that are unnaturally brighter or darker than other regions. In conventional photography, a lot of time is spent in trying to get the lighting uniform by manually adjusting the lighting in order to achieve uniform illumination. This technique is very time consuming, inaccurate and demanding. For very large, museum-size paintings, it is practically impossible to achieve perfectly uniform illumination on the paintings.
There remains a need for a simple method of correcting the non-uniform illumination characteristic in reproduced images of 2-D objects without requiring the illumination on the objects to be uniform.